“I was once a mother with twelve children. Ignorant in terms of education, far from beautiful, particularly in later years, with a wild temper and raucous voice. This was around Jerusalem in the sixth century. The children had many fathers. I did my best to provide for them.

“My name was Marshaba. We lived wherever we could, squatting in doorways and, finally, all begging. Yet in that existence, physical life had a contrast, a sharpness greater than any I had known. A crust of bread was far more delicious to me than any piece of cake, however well frosted, had ever been in lives before.

“When my children laughed I was overwhelmed with delight, and despite our privations, each morning was a triumphant surprise that we had not died in our sleep, that we had not succumbed to starvation.

“I chose that life deliberately, as each of you choose each of yours, and I did so because my previous lives had left me too blase. I was too cushioned. I no longer focused with clarity upon the truly spectacular physical delights and experiences that earth can provide.

“Though I yelled at my children and screamed sometimes in rage against the elements, I was struck through with the magnificence of existence, and learned more about true spirituality than I ever did as a monk. This does not mean that poverty leads to truth, or that suffering is good for the soul.

“Many who shared those conditions with me learned little. It does mean that each of you choose those life conditions that you have for your own purpose, knowing ahead of time where your weaknesses and strengths lie.

“In the gestalt of my personality, as in your terms I lived later richer lives, that woman was alive again in me—as, for example, the child is alive in the adult, and filled with gratitude comparing later circumstances to the earlier existences. She urged me to use my advantages better.”

Now listen to me. When you find yourself facing such negative images in your mind and projecting them into the future, you should at once mentally wipe out that image and replace it with a constructive image, seeing yourself, for example, sitting in command of a well-ordered room. This must be done immediately and upon every such occasion and under every such circumstance. This exercise will indeed wipe out the previous negative image.

“Now—each of you, to some degree or another here, believe that the universe is not safe, and therefore you must set up your defenses against it,’ Seth said that summer evening.

“Now, the one-line, official consciousness with which you are familiar, says: ‘The world is not safe. I cannot trust it. Nor can I trust the condition of experience, or the condition of my own existence; nor can I trust myself. …

“You have an entire civilization and world set up about those beliefs I have just given you: that the universe is not safe; that you must defend yourselves from enemies that come from without, and worst of all, from enemies that are within.

“And so indeed do you feel uneasy, and set up your barriers, and run as fast as you can, in whatever way given you, from those enemies that are the result of a one-line official kind of consciousness.

“As long as you believe that you dwell in a universe that is a threat, you must defend yourself against it. As long as you believe that the self is flawed, and that your race is damned and evil, you must also defend yourself against yourself, and how can you then trust the voice of the psyche? …

“You try to say, ‘The universe is safe,’ and then you watch the news on television, or you read your newspaper and you say, ‘What lie is this? How can the universe be safe when I read about wholesale murder, and war, and trickery and greed? …

“The one-line stage of consciousness was necessary for reason that Ruburt has given [in Psychic Politics and Adventures in Consciousness]. But that stage contained within it its own impetus. It set up challenges that could not be solved at that stage of consciousness, and that would automatically lead you into other strands of awareness. Only then can those contradictions make sense.

“Only then can you say, individually—and listen, now—‘I LIVE IN A SAFE UNIVERSE.’”